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Friday, December 3, 2010

Peer Score

Peer Score

Peer Score allows you to review your fellow players. Players who are running PS will be able to see this score on the player on mouseover behind the name.

Goal of this Addon

The game has seen a steadily growing number of uncaring, rude, mean, or simply bad players (unwilling to even learn). Peer Pressure is a means that may just stop these people from acting as if they are thabomb and by risking a bad review and risking no longer to be invited to raids on their realm they might just start behaving better.

Ideally Peer Score will become an indication of knowing what sort of person you’re inviting to your event, the way Gear Score has become the way to give an indication of the content this player has seen.

How it works

-Every player starts with a score of 1000

You can ‘score’ 5 different players per day (it will take the server time and reset at midnight)

Scoring is done by right-clicking on a player portrait

You can then select the Peer Score node and click thumbs up, or thumbs down

You are not allowed to score fellow guildmembers

If you do not score 5 players that day, those turns are simply lost, not accumulated

One player can be scored a maximum of 5 times per day.

At 1000 the number is white.

800 – 1000 yellow

600 – 800 orange

Anything below 600 is red

> 1001 is green

The Future

A number of safety checks have already been thought of in this addon to prevent dickheads from just downgrading decent players over and over. Because you can only score one player with one point per day, you would need a pretty big guild/friend group to decrease the score of a single player.

On the same though you cannot score guildies to prevent a guild voting a member back up when they have been rated down by other players.

This isn’t something that will get rid of bad players, but it might be something that will get some players to think again when they want to behave arrogantly.

And who knows…maybe in the future we can get reviews on people who have reached 0 and ideally ban their accounts completely if they do turn out to be part of the group that is making the game less fun to play for everybody. After all, even the fastest way to reach 0 would still take 200 days in a row with 5 times a thumbs down.

Credits where Credits should go.
I've been confronted with a lot of horrible pugs lately and when I was complaining to a guildie about it he said he wished there was more peer control. By talking to him and running this stuff past him the idea got more shape.

Would you use an addon like this? Are there things missing still before you would use it? What are possible issues you see when something like this would be used?

11 comments:

I would use an addon like this although I don't know how you would achieve it technically. How would the addon know that someone else had voted someone down (or up) unless you happened to be present when they did it? Assuming this could be solved then the only other issue I see is the subjective nature of the addon. Some people could be voted down due to poor performance and then later voted up for being a nice guy.

The problem *I* have with this sort of idea is that I'm not really sure I trust user reviews in this context.

Imagine how many tanks would wind up with negative scores from ogogogog-types for being too slow. DPS who'd be voted down for being bottom on recount in a levelling dungeon. Healers could get negative reviews when they ran out of mana or couldn't keep people standing in the wrong place alive...

I'd love to use a guild-restricted version though, where I could optionally choose to receive data from trusted players. It would mean that the PeerScore I saw for someone might be very different to the PeerScore *you* saw for someone, but if we have different perceptions of what's acceptable (which we might) then we could both still benefit.

I do use an addon called "Have We Met" which lets me easily rate people I meet in the DF or PuGs, and add a quick comment. I'm not attempting to classify every single person I meet or anything silly like that, but it lets me make a note of anyone extremely pleasant or extremely unpleasant, and adds this info to the player tooltip. A useful crutch for my lousy memory :)

In my opinion, there are various trust issues. As an addon, it would have no other option than to store in on users' computers. Can you trust what a stranger's computer tells you about someone? Maybe they have the basic skills needed to fake peer score; unlike GS there is no way to verify they did not.

Another, how do I know the player was rated on something that was important to me? Maybe if there was more than one metric - let's say patience (do they drop group after first wipe despite it was caused by them and blame someone else?), politeness, gear etc. You mentioned GS - that addon does not provide a single metric either. I understand a lot of players wish for a magic number that would tell them everything but I think world just doesn't work that way. Of course, it is quite easy to downgrade a player on all scales just because he didn't have 6000 GS in ICC or something.

It would be interesting to display how many up/downs has the user given too. If someone downgrade 5 people each day for weeks or months with no upgrades, the chance they are just that unlucky is not very high I think.

All good points. I think it would not be impossible to add an extra score sheet so when you want to rate a player you have to do so on a variety of things, politeness, playstyle, knowledge of the game are things that just come to mind. From this an overal score could be gotten.

How many scores sounds more like a like/dislike function. Like it's done with websites for example, or forum posts, or for that matter...comments :)